


Last Gasp at University Heights

by theinimitablefolding



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Descriptions of sex, F/F, Modernism, Nsfw?, a little bit, accidentally, are you reading fanfic at work?, during the quarantine?, i read quicksand and now this is what you get, i'm sorry about that, it's not poorly written its a choice, nella larson who?, now i'm imitating James, post-modernism?, read wings of the dove, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:30:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23666158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theinimitablefolding/pseuds/theinimitablefolding
Summary: Chloe wakes up after a night with Max and tries to make sense of her feelings.
Relationships: Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price
Comments: 5
Kudos: 49





	1. Chloe

Chloe Price sat alone in a perfect and perpetual darkness. She was certain that no matter how long she sat there, eyes open, her vision would never adjust, such was the totality of that blackness. Her eyes would never fall upon the outlines of furniture, and she would never pick out that distorted geometry and give it form in her mind. Bedside table. Desk. Stereo. Ash tray. Lighter. Max. Max. Max. The darkness, like air into a vacuum, exploded out of the room, and all that remained was the sleeping form of her best friend. Best friend. She knew the ragged sound of her best friend’s voice in climax. Knew the arching of her back when she touched her properly. Knew her hot breath against her throat, and the confessions that came with it. She knew these things, and because of them she knew nothing else.

What were they now? From her memory she fished snatches of the night prior and tried to form that chaos into something like order. They had made love, she knew, and to that node she started mapping meaning. Max in her bedroom, exploring the space. Chloe rolling a joint and Max coughing, tears coming to her eyes. Then the feeling of Max’s hands on her waist. Had that come first, or later? She watched her sleep, as though the slow slope of her shoulders would provide answers. In the gentle languidity of her hand on her stomach, Chloe tried to find answers, but none sprung to her. Events transposed against other events, but nothing aligned neatly. She longed for edges to map together, but they all provided alternating truths. 

They had met again, she knew. She had, in fact, been hoping to meet Max once more. Knew that she was in town for school. Deliberately frequented campus and coffee shops and diners and the library. Deliberately did not wear headphones when she walked. Eyes scanned crowds in the hope that her eyes would meet Max’s, and that they would fall in love again, in that moment. Love. Lovers. Were they that now? Did that thing exist now between them, reformed or refound? She could taste Max in her mouth, and surely that was only something that could be said of a lover. 

So too could she taste Max’s voice in her mouth. Yes. Yes. Yes. Ecstasy? No. Consent. She could feel Max in her lap, their lips just touching, glancing off of one another, and she could hear, like an echo, her own voice. Are you sure? She felt then that familiar desire and the weight of Max on top of her and the need for her to remain there. She wanted so badly to remain there. Wanted so badly for Max to love her. To make love to her. To be together. She wanted and wanted and wanted and never could she surrender that want, no matter how long they had been apart or how many people had passed between them. They faded like ghosts on the horizon, and all that remained was Max, and her voice in her mouth. Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m sure. Max had found her like a starving woman, and she had taken her ravenously, and Max had given herself with a hundred yeses whispered and then moaned.

That voice. A thundering, calamitous thing through the air. It tore houses from foundations. Shook it all. Sheer bewilderment in a cacophonous silence. A coffee shop, empty but her and the barista, and somehow Max had managed to surprise her from behind. Chloe? She spun, but before she did, she knew exactly who it was. There she stood. There they stood. Together. The last remains of some distant continent. Some wreckage, still smoking, had spat them out of Oregon and they had converged in New York. On that campus. In that shop. In that moment. Her heart ached from it all. How badly she wanted her even in that moment of surprise.

Max! Brown hair, cut short, tired eyes, that half-smiling mouth, those fingers twisting around one another. Those empty ring fingers, blessedly bare. That camera bag, well worn. That slightness of being that blazed there and everywhere around her, always had. Max was smiling sadly. It was all her. It was exactly as she had always been, and yet entirely different. How had she changed so much? Was she always so tall? Had she always looked just through her? Had there always been that weariness in her gaze? And what of those trembling, petulant lips, so badly in need of kissing? Can I buy you a drink?

Isn’t it late for coffee? Let the sky open up. Let everything come to a screeching halt in this coffee shop. Let the earth be reduced to ash but let this moment persist. She shifted on her feet and that smile lilted. It was late, but she didn’t want Max to flee like she had. Considerations to be made. How to keep her. How to maintain this connection for as long as possible. Then the old familiar anger, flaring like a cobra about to strike. Why had she left? Why had she stayed gone? Even after? No. Too late to change that now, and too late to demand answers. They had been children then, and now they were women, and Chloe wanted this to be something more than what their adolescent flirting had been. She wanted more than she had known to want then. How to keep her, then.

Okay, tea? Decaf? Water? Max looked from Chloe to the door. Had her jaw always been that sharp? Had she always crossed her arms that way? Stay. Stay. Stay! Would it be another day before she saw Max again? Another week? Would they ever see one another again? If she left now, that would be it, she knew. Coffee, awkward conversation, and slow walks back to Chloe’s front door, the meandering sort of canter through University Heights that inevitably caused a pair to bump shoulders. A joint. An excuse to get nearer to one another. Handing Max a glass of water. And then, Max was brave. She straddled Chloe and they were kissing, and breathing hard. 

Chloe. Max said, and they were kissing again. Max tasted like weed and coffee and in any other scenario it might have been disgusting, but now she could live in it. Max pressed their bodies together. Pressed them into one person. Wanted them to be closer. Chloe could feel her nipples through her shirt. Could feel her ribs. All bones and skin like silk stretched over stone. Imagine the movie star lights. Imagine the pristine smiles. 

Max. She whispered. Max. How long Max? Ten years? Why did you leave? Why didn’t you call me? We could have been something all this time. All those years and her dead father and her loneliness. It didn’t hurt now, though. She slipped her hands under Max’s shirt to rest on her waist. Max, are you sure? Do you want me? After so long? After everything I did? Yes. Yes. Yes. I need you. I’ve needed you my whole life. I need you. 

They made love.

Will you be here in the morning? 

It’s already morning.

Will you?

Yes. 

Yes. Yes. Yes. And Max was still there in the morning, sleeping beside her, but stirring, and turning over and pushing herself into Chloe as though she could occupy the same space. To be close was not close enough. She needed to be closer. One. It would seem. 

They were pirates in Chloe’s room. They were 12. They were laughing and boasting and making grand gestures of piracy and bloodlust and adventure. They were looking at one another. Pirates could marry whoever they pleased, she said. Then I’ll marry you and we’ll be wives on the high seas! Do pirates have preachers or does someone else do it? Like the first mate, but that’s me so…the second mate? Was this love? She recalled Max, breathless, at the very zenith of an orgasm, kissing her. Voice hot in her mouth. Eyes penetrating and immediate. 

I love you.

Tell me you’ll never leave me.

I never will. 

Max stirred once more and her eyes peaked open, dreamy, still tired. It was early, and upon seeing Chloe she smiled and Chloe could see all of the same recognition that was in her in Max, and she wondered what she was feeling. Was it regret that she had said it? Or said it so soon? Or said it and not meant it? She lay back down out of her seated position and looked at her first mate. They were silent, just looking. Max’s fingers traced delicately around Chloe’s throat, where she had left a hickey. 

Sorry. 

You should be. 

What time is it?

Do you have somewhere to be? It’s nine. 

I have a seminar at noon. 

Silence for a moment. 

I…

One summer, then all of this is over. They’re teenagers and Max is moving, and Chloe’s father is still alive, and nothing is right, but nothing is wrong. Not just yet, anyway. One day soon they won’t have one another, and Chloe can already feel that rising panic in her gut and that endless, youthful, queer desire like a spike through her heart. She can’t name it yet, but one day she’ll be fingering her girlfriend in a parking lot and she’ll recognize that she’s only looking for Max. Looking for the idea of Max.

Will you call me? 

All the weight of ten years, heavy and breathing between them, an angry animal. Chloe tries not to look at it. She tries not to feel that familiar feeling of betrayal and anger and love and yearning but it’s all too much there between them. She could spit. She could kick her out. They could make love again. Skip the seminar. Skip school. Waste away with me in this bed. Let us die together in each other’s arms. Nothing outside of this room could ever interest me ever again, when you’re in here with me. She doesn’t say any of this, doesn’t even really feel it, but for a moment. 

Max touches Chloe’s neck and traces her collarbone along her shoulder and then to the tattoo on her arm. She’s quiet, just fingers running over skin, and Chloe feels a fire inside of her, burning out any other feeling. It’s so hot it turns the anger to glass. Turns everything to hot, cracking glass beneath her feet. Max is smiling at her. They’re kissing. Will you call me? Will we see each other again? Will you be mine? Did you mean what you said last night? I’ve loved you my whole life.

They make love. They fuck. 

They fall in love again.


	2. Max

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max imagines their life together.

It was all the while for her as though Chloe Price had been that incongruous piece of the jigsaw puzzle, from which one ostensibly mislocates the larger pictures in something else. Ah, one thinks, this piece reveals that all along this was not a barn in winter, but a whole house on fire; burning and decaying in the low summer light. Chloe Price, then, was that piece which was not so much a cornerstone as the puzzle itself. Upon seeing her, Max thought, aha! There it is then, all the evidence of this great sham of a life. Chloe Price, who revealed so effortlessly in the turn of her eyes, in the twisting smile on her lips, and in the angry shifting on her toes, that Max’s life had, since that last day in Oregon, been a thin veneer of falsity laid out over something like love for the woman who now stood just there, on the other side of that glass. She couldn’t help that clarity which found her, as much as she might wish to, and all of it twisted up inside of her like some wailing baby, grabbing and kicking and shouting and screaming and crying and demanding all at once this attention which she so desperately sought to answer. Was that the truth, she wondered? Was that what the truth was like, the way it made itself manifest, in some unanswerable form which could neither be held and smothered nor ignored? Something which made its home in your heart and wailed for the rest of your life, daring you to ignore it, imploring you to turn away from it that it might do damage to you so irreparable that the Max Caulfield who would remain would be nothing in its face. Less even than what she was now. She thought of Chloe as she had known her when they were young, and the truth’s persistent cries of agonized being only grew: brown hair, in a ponytail, that mischievous glint in her eye, a baseball t-shirt, and what else? The softness of her lips that once when they had kissed. It felt like a dream to her now, half remembered on the distance, and impossible to parse in the din. It felt stranger still that in her memory it was not her and Chloe then, but as they were now. Chloe’s hair slowly fading from green to brown, rail thin, pale, feral in her mode, clothes hanging ragged from her and a look in her eye of fierce intelligence and immeasurable fury, that look attainable only through knowledge; that knowledge that everything was constructed of falsity, and that resistance to that system of untruths was only next to hopeless; that dogged determination to destroy that system within and without. That look of a liberal arts education attained through luck, all the while being surrounded by those whose luck was that their father owned a company, and cared so little what they did that they weren’t even pushed to law, or medicine, but allowed to engage so readily and aggravatingly with literature, or art history. It was Chloe, then, but new. And that girl who existed in Max’s memories was now nothing more than some dead thing. Dead, dead, dead. And she would never again be as she was, and Max yearned for that change. She needed it. All she would have to do was step through the door and make herself known. Hello Chloe, she might say. Would Chloe throw her arms around her, would they kiss? Would this be the meeting of so many romantic films wherein the childhood friends became lovers in a chance instant? A frantic encounter giving way to a frantic life together? She would have to take that step to find out. 

Time was ebbing by perilously slowly, and still she remained. It had been seconds since she had seen Chloe, but Chloe had not seen her, and she knew that they would eventually meet even by running into one another as Chloe left the coffee shop. Perhaps their meeting could be delayed to that, then; yes! Chloe would step out of the coffee shop and run into her. A bump, spilled coffee, and Chloe would offer to take her to her place, which would be closer, of course, and Max could wear Chloe’s clothes and they could laugh and smile and fall into one another. Max loved her, she knew, but more than that she lusted after her in this moment; the former would persist after the latter was satisfied, she knew, but the lust was that much more pressing for its need to be satisfied. She had to make room for the love, or it threatened to split her open and cause all of her being to come spilling out of the new orifice which it left in its wake, as though that love would be given form and function out of her and attain something like momentum towards Chloe. That feeling terrified her. Sent shivers all through her, and still her knees shook, and her stomach ached, and she was wet, and longed to give herself to Chloe, who she had so long been finding in other women and men, who she had always already been spoiled for, and who she thought she would never find again in all her life. Chloe who she had been resigned to never again know, was there before her, and she could already imagine that tongue inside of her and the imagined sensation almost knocked her over. She could not wait then, could not possibly stand to wait outside of this coffee shop for however many interminable moments Chloe Price spent inside, and would need to walk in. Would walk in. Was walking in. She was beside her now, and could smell cigarettes faintly, and bitterness, and the faint musk of the evening after a day spent on campus, and she could feel the saliva in her mouth, like a dog about to get dinner, she needed Chloe Price. How many hours before they were making love? One? Impossible. The wait would kill her. It mustn’t. She inhaled. That scent shot through her, and riled her, and made her think of all the things they would do tonight and tomorrow and the next day and for the rest of their squalid lives. Together. She spoke.

“Chloe?”

That rapturous turn, that shock in her face. It was in a word something that she had never expected to see again, those eyes so full of mystery and thoughtfulness, all of it the sort of well-dressed miasma of desire. She was at once transported to a museum in Italy, her hand in Chloe’s, their eyes affixed to some statuesque thing or another, a woman with a bear chest and those cold, blank, endless eyes which seemed at once to look through you and into you more deeply than any being ever could – that seemed to know you. Those well affixed lips, that nose now broken off by the endless, damning march of some white man or another who stole this statue, the displaced ephemera of a forgotten religion about the statue’s pedestal. Max looked from the statue to Chloe and felt a deep and abiding placelessness, that they would never be – the two of them – affixed to some point in space, and that this endless wandering created them as beings outside of place. She imagined the smell of gasoline and cold sleeping bags in the bag of a van, imagined the sting of frozen hands in the morning, the hushed whispers that morning brought, that the sun was up and that they should get moving. Chloe had wanted these things, once, and Max found now, looking at her, that she had never shook the desire to give to Chloe whatever it was that she wanted. She would take her anywhere. They would see these statues, and these places, and these people. She imagined this and the implacable feeling of untidiness that had taken hold of her these past ten years found purchase in her heart with Chloe’s name, that feeling of incompleteness, and the solution to it here in front of her, eyes wide, half smiling, half shocked. How badly Max wanted her. How much she wanted to be with her, and how much she wanted to be beneath her. She had been proud of her intelligence, and of her poise, and of all the other qualities that had brought her this far in life, to such a well respected school, to know such intelligent and charming people, but she found that she was an animal where Chloe was concerned. All she could think about was her, and fucking her. And loving her. In her gut, something growled, and the hunger rose and fell with each heartbeat. 

“Max!” 

How many people had she been with in these ten years, Max wondered. One? Two? Fifteen? A thousand? Max wanted to know that the number was high, that Chloe had been well loved, that her body had been worshipped, that every inch of her had been kissed, so that she could come along after they had all touched her, and still give her something unknown to her. She wanted to follow after them, and make her forget they had ever been there. She wanted Chloe to find something like virginity again. The thought of Chloe being with someone, being in love with someone, did not occur to her. How could she ever have loved another, Max wondered, when she had found herself so very incapable of just that, all her life to that point. There had been other’s, of course, but they had always been so deeply inadequate, so completely perfect in many ways, and yet never what she wanted, never the thing she was looking for, and to this she had always assumed she was condemned; that life of endless yearning which seemed before so easy now seemed impossible. If she did not have Chloe now, right this minute, she would collapse into dust. What ever had become of the shy and timid girl she had been before tonight? What was this endless thing she found inside of herself now? The way Chloe looked at her, too, Max knew that this was a mutual state of being, a mutual need. It was so clear, somehow, as though they were the same person, experiencing now precisely the same emotion, this shared feeling, passing like electricity between them. She wanted Chloe to be and do and see everything only with her. To her. Upon her. When Chloe asked if she could buy her coffee, Max was already planning the wedding, and as she watched Chloe’s long fingers extract the wallet from her pocket, fumbling now from nerves, Max thought: Chloe, we will never again be what we were before tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is from after reading Wings of the Dove by Henry James.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in three hours after finishing Nella Larson's Quicksand. So sorry about the way it is.


End file.
